The invention relates to a dip pipe for apparatuses for the separation of mixtures made up of one liquid or gaseous medium and one liquid or gaseous substance having a higher specific gravity than the medium under the action of centrifugal forces, the medium freed at least partially from the substance being removed from the apparatus through this pipe, with a baffle means at one end of the dip pipe, wherein the baffle means consists of at least one curved baffle and wherein the distance of the baffle from the longitudinal axis of the dip pipe becomes increasingly smaller in the peripheral direction. Facilities for the separation of mixtures of at least one substance and one medium have been known, for example, from EP-A-398,864.
In these known devices, dip pipes are provided for the discharge of the medium freed at least in part, preferably entirely, from the substance or substances to be separated; these dip pipes project into the separating chamber.
It is also known from EP-A-398,864 to arrange baffle devices, in the form of baffle plates, between the dip pipes, these baffle devices extending in the direction of flow from the inside toward the outside in order to effect reversal of the flow direction of the medium when passing from the chamber wherein the substance mixture is set into rotation into the chamber where the actual separation takes place.
Furthermore, baffle means at dip pipes are known in the prior art (for example, Austrian Patent 13,036, British Patent 245,636), which comprise baffle plates; however, the latter are curved about the dip pipe vertical axis. This results in an exclusively radial acceleration which, however, does not contribute anything toward transfer of the medium into the dip pipe.
Further, propeller-like baffle devices are known in the state of the art having several vanes at the inlet end of the dip pipe wherein the individual vanes are oriented so that they reduce or entirely eliminate the rotary movement of the medium entering into the dip pipe. These arrangements, however, have not become popular in practice on account of problems encountered in flow dynamics. The reason for this unpopularity is that the actual flow directions in the region of the dip pipe orifice are unknown.